


real artificial heart

by lagaudiere



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-16 19:04:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11835078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lagaudiere/pseuds/lagaudiere
Summary: She doesn't tell Magnus that she's perfectly capable of reforming her whole body, and she has. She's taken her robotic components apart and rearranged them in endless shapes, some of them very close to how she looked when she was alive.But they are only ever alike in profile. In detail, no one could ever mistake her for an organic being, and it seems pretty pathetic to try. She prefers to see this constructed body as just as container for her soul. It's not ever going to feel like part of her.





	real artificial heart

**Author's Note:**

> i would describe this as like mostly gen very slightly het... if that's not your thing well it's not my thing either but here we are 
> 
> thanks for reading -- i'm on tumblr @ spacesocialist

People say, sometimes, that you can't go home again.

When Noelle goes back to her hometown of Hogsbottom, her father cries, deep tears of mourning like he's losing her all over again. Her youngest brothers climb all over her body, chattering excitedly, but the older ones hang back and look suspicious of her. It hurts more than she knows how to say, more than her mechanical form can express.

When Noelle goes to see her cousin Hathaway -- the only other girl in the family, her best friend when they were growing up -- Hath is happy for see her, talking to her like it's old times.

She's pregnant, Noelle realizes with a start as soon as she sees her. She’s been away, first in the astral plane and then floating around Lucas’ lab, and in that time Hathaway got married and has a baby on the way.

There's something about the physicality of it, her rounded abdomen that means she's sheltering a new, growing life, that makes Noelle horribly jealous. She hadn't been sure she wanted children -- she’d always been focused on the company she’d run one day -- but now she doesn't have that choice, and that seems painfully unfair.

Hathaway brings her a cup of tea, and Noelle raises it to her screened panel face before realizing she can't drink it.

She can't taste the cider her family makes or feel the sunshine on her skin, because she doesn't have any skin.

On the moonbase, she thinks, there she could make a difference. She could fight. Here, she's just out of place.

She knows she can't stay. When she told the creepy skeleton man from the astral plane that she had things she still wanted to do, this was what she meant. She'd wanted to be with her family again. But when she’s there, she knows that all she can do is say goodbye.

  
***

  
Magnus Burnsides has a thing about robots.  
  
The crux of it, Noelle thinks, is that he doesn't understand how they work, but he wants to. He's impatient with not knowing how things work; she can see that impatience in his face whenever people talk about magic. He sometimes quizzes Taako about why he needs components for some spells but not others, or why wizards need wands and staffs to cast at all.  
  
"I don't know," Taako will say, equally impatient. "We just do." And Magnus snorts in contempt and mutters about magical nonsense.  
  
Magnus can't grasp magic, but he tries very hard to learn other things, the things that Carey knows. Noelle watches him training sometimes, doing the same things over and over until he gets them perfectly right, and then doing them over and over again.  
  
It's strange, how that seems like a foreign concept now. She goes through the motions of training with Carey and Killian, and it's useful learning how to work as a team. But she doesn't get sweaty, or tired. She doesn't need to practice at anything now. She calculates the probability that she will succeed at something, and then she just does it.  
  
She'd calculated the odds that she would be unable to avoid the sword swung at her by one of the Director's former bodyguards, a defector she and the team were chasing down. She hadn't avoided it.  
  
Now three of the fingers in her hand are broken, and Magnus, who had boisterously asserted that he was both a master craftsman and an expert on robot arms, is attempting to fix them.  
  
Magnus is determined to know about this, too, the complex system of parts fitting together that makes up her physical body, more complex than anything made out of wood.  
  
"Does this hurt you at all?" he asks her, carefully untangling the system of wires in her joints.  
  
"No," Noelle says. "I'm -- my system is aware of it, but I can't feel it? If that makes sense?"  
  
"I guess that's a good thing in this case," Magnus says. He snaps the delicate outer framework of her pinky finger back into place. "Can you move that?"  
  
Noelle tries. She can't.  
  
"Damn it," Magnus says. He drives the small screwdriver he's holding back between the small metal plates.  
  
It feels unnatural that it doesn't hurt. It feels wrong.  
  
"I'm gonna get this," Magnus tells her. "I know I'm not exactly Lucas, but, I'll figure it out. I promise."  
  
"I know you will," Noelle says.  
  
It takes him a few tries, but he does, eventually. And then she's -- as Lucas used to proclaim cheerfully when he finished his repairs -- as good as new.

  
***  
  
Most of the Bureau of Balance has accepted Noelle as a member without much question. She got plenty of odd looks at first, and the orc who runs the HR department threw a fit about how complicated her employment paperwork was, but overall, she's just one more strange thing in a place and a group of people that is already overwhelmingly strange.  
  
It's different from how things were back at the lab. Lucas was alright, mostly, but he never really treated her as an equal. Not the way the people here do.  
  
She's getting used to having friends again, she thinks.  
  
So she doesn't think much of it when Magnus invites her to play frisbee on the quad with Carey, Killian and Avi. She even tries to tamp down her physical precision and miss an equitable percentage of the time, so that her more organic companions won't feel strange.  
  
But when the others head off to dinner, and Noelle doesn't -- she doesn't eat, and it's awkward hovering around in the cafeteria space that she's much too big for -- Magnus stays behind, flipping the frisbee from hand to hand and looking at her out of the corner of his eye.  
  
"So," he says slowly, cautiously. "I mostly just asked you to come with because, y'know, I wanna be better friends, but uh. Uh."  
  
"Look, Magnus," Noelle says, vaguely irritated. "If you have somethin' you wanna ask me, you can just say it. I don't bite. Don't have a mouth."  
  
He bites his lip, laughs a little, and then just spits it out.  
  
"What's it like?" Magnus asks her. "Being dead?"  
  
Noelle would sigh, if robots could sigh.  
  
This question is sort of like the undead version of the one she got when she was alive, from everyone taller than a standard halfling: "hey, what's the weather like down there?" Only this one isn't rhetorical or a taunt. People really want to know, and Noelle is probably the only person they'll ever meet who can give you an honest answer.  
  
"Was she your wife?" she says. "Julia?"  
  
Magnus laughs, but it's a tense, strangled kind of laugh. "People don't usually just ask," he says. "They see the ring and they probably assume but they don't... say... Yeah. She was."  
  
Noelle's stuck for a moment on how to respond, and after a terrible pause Magnus is the one who breaks the silence.  
  
"I was never that religious," he says. "Neither was she. We weren't raised with it. Guess it does make me feel better, knowing -- knowing for sure I'm going to see her again."  
  
"I'm glad I could help, then," Noelle says, quietly.  
  
He smiles at her, awkwardly, standing there with his hand stuck deep into the pockets of his cargo pants and looking, still, a little lost.  
  
Then there's the loud clatter of the cafeteria doors flying open forcefully, and two very peeved looking Reclaimers are striding towards them, arguing all the way.  
  
"Magnus!" Taako calls from a distance, pointing his umbrella at him in a somewhat accusatory fashion. "Would you please tell Merle that I would appreciate it if he stopped taking the enchanted arrowheads I'm saving for spells and using them to stick posters of middle-aged women to our walls?"  
  
"Magnus," Merle retorts loudly, arms crossed, "would you please tell Taako that I paid for half of those arrowheads, and there's nothing wrong with appreciating the art of the great dwarven county rock singers?"  
  
"Oh, yeah. I'm sure you appreciate the _art_."  
  
Magnus shrugs hopelessly at Noelle. "Thanks again," he says, and walks off towards his team, leaving her feeling uncomfortable in a way she doesn't want to think about. 

  
***

  
Carey is going to ask Killian to marry her.

Carey told Noelle about it, nervously, showing her the ring hidden in her duck-shaped puzzle box and swearing her to secrecy, but seeming too excited to keep it to herself.

  
Noelle thinks Magnus must have made the ring for her; it's made of delicately carved wood, like the one he wears himself, and Carey isn't very good at carving yet. 

She's happy for them -- or she's going to be happy for them when it happens, because of course Killian will say yes -- but she does feel a twinge of the same jealousy she’d felt seeing Hathaway’s pregnancy. It's another thing she won't ever get to have, won't get to choose for herself whether she wants it.

“It was real nice to you to help Carey make that puzzle box for Killian,” Noelle says, slyly, to Magnus.

“Oh, sure,” Magnus says. “You know, I like doing it. You looking for a gift for someone? I could make something for you.” He beams at her, genuinely excited about the prospect.

Magnus isn't handsome, exactly. He has a body that Noelle knows she would have appreciated much more deeply when she had a body to appreciate it with -- broad, muscular, tall. But his face is scarred and weatherbeaten, his hair unkempt in a way that isn't deliberate, his many chipped teeth visible when he smiles. But there's something about his smile that Noelle does appreciate, that she finds herself craving.

She wonders, even as she scolds herself for it, if Magnus would have thought she was pretty. She used to think she wasn't, always comparing herself to Hathaway, who didn't have Noelle’s too-big nose and too many freckles, whose toes were, as halfling women's should be, longer than her fingers. But Noelle would give anything for that flawed body now.

“Oh, I don't think I need anything like that,” Noelle says. “Not right now, anyway. But I’ll keep you in mind.”

  
***

  
Noelle shares a suite at the Bureau with Carey and Killian, and most of the time that's nice; she's hardly ever alone. But when she is, it's much harder to deal with loneliness than it ever was when she was alive. So many solitary activities rely on having a body. There are no long baths, no individual indulgences in junk food. Even reading is, oddly, less satisfying now that she can do it so much more quickly.

She's alone one night when a loud knock on her door breaks her silence, followed quickly by Magnus’ booming, energetic voice.

  
"Carey?" a voice outside her door says. "Carey, it's me, Taako and Merle are both gonna be gone all night and I was just wondering if you wanted to --"  
  
Noelle opens the door.  
  
"Oh," Magnus says. "Sorry, um. Is Carey here?"  
  
"She's off with Killian," Noelle says. "Said somethin' about seein' a battlewagon race."  
  
Magnus looks faintly annoyed. "I would've liked to go to that," he says.  
  
"Well," Noelle says awkwardly, "I think it was sort of a romantic evening."  
  
Magnus sighs. "Oh," he says.  
  
Noelle looks at his downcast eyes and opens the door further. "Do you want to come in? Stay for a little bit?" 

“Yeah,” he says, too quickly. “Thanks.”

When he walks in, he doesn't sit down or make some suggestion of what they should do; he wanders restlessly around their shared living room instead, idley lifting up daggers, whetstones, and half-carved wooden animals to examine them.

  
"Magnus... is somethin' wrong?" Noelle asks. "I mean, really wrong?"  
  
He laughs a little, and shrugs at her like he doesn't know, like it's hopeless.  
  
"Merle went planetside for the whole weekend and won't even tell me where he's going," Magnus says. "And Taako, he's dating some guy but he wouldn't say who it is or anything... I don't know." He trails off, stares at the floor.  
  
"I'm sure you have things you don't tell them, too," Noelle says. "Everybody's got to have some secrets."  
  
But this seems to make Magnus even more upset.  
  
"You think maybe they don't trust me?"  
  
"'Course they do," Noelle says, forcing a cheerfulness she doesn't feel.

“I hope so,” Magnus mumbles.

He looks miserable. Noelle can't imagine it, what they deal with when they find those relics that can reshape reality. How much you must have to trust someone else to go on those missions together.

“Hey, listen,” Noelle says. “If everyone else is goin’ down to the surface, why don't we? I could show you my hometown.” This seems embarrassingly presumptuous as soon as she says it, and she quickly adds, “If you want.”

He perks up a little at that. “What do you do for fun in Hogsbottom?”

“I dunno,” Noelle says. “When I was growing up, we used to… we used to go catch fireflies? Not very exciting, but…”

“No,” Magnus says quickly. “That actually sounds really good.”

  
***

  
Magnus asks her if she'd want a new body, if he could make it for her. He says he'll try, if that's something she's interested in. He reminds her that he is a master craftsman.  
  
"Something more humanoid -- or, well, halfling," he says.

She doesn't tell Magnus that she's perfectly capable of reforming her whole body, and she has. She's taken her robotic components apart and rearranged them in endless shapes, some of them very close to how she looked when she was alive.

But they are only ever alike in profile. In detail, no one could ever mistake her for an organic being, and it seems pretty pathetic to try. She prefers to see this constructed body as just as container for her soul. It's not ever going to feel like part of her.  

  
"What use is a robot halfling gonna be in battle?" Noelle says lightly, like it's all a joke. "I'll stick with my tactical equipment."  
  
"I could at least make you something that's a little more of a face, if you wanted," Magnus says. "Maybe make it look, you know, like yours."  
  
"You don't know what my face looked like," Noelle says.  
  
Magnus looks down at his hands, at the piece of wood he's whittling into some shape she can't identify. "We saw you," he says. "When the Temporal Chalice tried to get us to uh, to use it. It showed us people dying, people in Phandalin."  
  
"Oh," Noelle says, stunned.  
  
She doesn't like to think about how she died. She doesn't think she likes the idea of Magnus knowing about it, either, much less having seen it. She doesn't like to think he's seen her the way she used to be.  
  
"We didn't change anything," Magnus says, and she watches the knife he's holding slip a little, slicing a tiny cut into his callused thumb. He barely reacts to it, just wipes the blood away on his shirt. "But a lot of the time I wish we had."  
  
***

  
Noelle’s having a pretty bad day, but she would guess that Magnus is having an even worse one. He isn't dead, and that's a relief that she feels deeply, that somehow makes it seem more likely they can win this fight.

"You were a mannequin for a while, huh?" Noelle asks Magnus.  
  
He's rubbing at his shoulder, where the strange wolf made of the hunger had bitten him, and he winces. "Yeah," he says. "I didn't love that. Haven't loved a lot of today, but. Yeah."  
  
His body is human and real, real enough to hurt and to bleed, and she'd do anything to have that again, and it isn't fair.  
  
You aren't supposed to get second chances. That man who followed her and Maureen from the astral plane, Kravitz, said that back in the lab. Even what she'd been granted was an extraordinary step, and Magnus had gotten even more.  
  
And he's bleeding, now, and he won't get a third chance.  
  
Part of her wants to reach out to him, touch him. She wouldn't feel it.  
  
"I guess now you know what it's like," Noelle says.  
  
Magnus looks up at her, and she sees him understand, a deep sadness in his eyes.  
  
"Maybe someday --" He swallows hard, and Noelle thinks they both know he's being overly optimistic, but he presses on anyway. "Maybe someday we can do this for you."  
  
She wishes there was a chance of that. She wishes for a lot of things, and more of them involve Magnus than she'd like to admit.  
  
She watches him, squaring his shoulders and getting ready for another fight, and she watches Carey and Killian, standing together, a perfect unit.  
  
They will live through this, she promises herself. That's something she can do. Something that counts.  
  
Noelle turns towards the horizon and watches the sky.


End file.
